Revision as of 05:23, 23 May 2013

Puppet is IT automation software that helps system administrators manage infrastructure throughout its lifecycle, from provisioning and configuration to patch management and compliance. Using Puppet, you can easily automate repetitive tasks, quickly deploy critical applications, and proactively manage change, scaling from 10s of servers to 1000s, on-premise or in the cloud.

Contents

Puppet

Installation

Puppet packages are available in AUR. Install either puppetAUR or puppet-gitAUR. The maintainer of the puppet AUR packages is not interested in shipping patches to minimize work as well as avoid confusion as to where bugs should go. So I will collect my patches here.

Configuration

Puppet's main configuration file is puppet.conf which is located at
/etc/puppet/puppet.conf.
You have 3 options to place settings depending if it is a master/agent

[main]
[agent]
[master]

Bare minimum of settings are:

server: The hostname of the puppet server. Default = puppet

report: Most users should set this to true.

pluginsync: Most users should set this to true.

certname: The certified name of the machine (unique identifier) default = fqdn

Puppet will look for node configuration in /etc/puppet/manifests/site.pp.

After starting puppet by daemon/cron/standalone, it will generate
certificates in /etc/puppet/ssl/ directory.
And you need to accept this certificaten the puppet master with:
sudo puppet cert sign <name>.

Facter

Facter is a companion program of puppet that gathers facts about the system it runs on.
commands:# puppet facts find facter# facter -p

Installation

Install it from aur ruby-facterAUR.
Facter requires both ifconfig as well as ip to gather network related facts.

With facter 1.7.0 the new ifconfig in arch will give proper output
to IP adresses, but netmask/mtu are still a problem.

Netmask has been adressed on github version of facter.

puppet resources

Packages

"Pacman" is supported by puppet. Installing packages works out of the box since puppet 3.1.0.

Services

Since puppet 3.2.1 systemd on archlinux is fully supported.
The systemd provider in Puppet today only uses two commands for the service enable state: